We know that the 1944 plot to kill Hitler failed. He’d have another nine months yet to go before he did the job himself. So that element of suspense is missing from Valkyrie, in which Tom Cruise plays Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the war hero who planted the bomb that very nearly did blow up the Führer. Cruise is a rather stolid presence in a rather stolid film. For all the conspiracy-mongering and so forth, it takes a good hour for Valkyrie to get suspenseful. By then, we’re pretty much inside Hitler’s bunker. After that, it’s up to the standard Hollywood mechanisms of tension-building to grip us. Until that point, the viewer is all too distractable. For me, it was a bit like watching Jesus of Nazareth about 30 years ago: the fun was in waiting for the next famous face to turn up — Peter Ustinov, Laurence Olivier, James Mason, Anthony Quinn … In Valkyrie, it’s a host of well-known character actors: Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Terence Stamp, Tom Hollander, Eddie Izzard … You expect Udo Kier to pop up at any minute, but when he does it is in fact Christian Berkel. Hitler, by the way, is played by David Bamber, who was Cicero in the TV series Rome. At this point in history, it would appear, Hitler was a rather ill vampire. Perhaps the echo of Max Schreck in Nosferatu was intentional.